With my background of spatial terrorism analysis I’m always very interested in the statistical analysis of crime data. Scott Stoltzman over at stoltzmaniac.com discovered a great data set by the City and County of Denver. It has data about all the criminal offenses in the City and County of Denver for the previous five calendar years plus the current year to date with plenty of attributes, timestamps and even geographic locations. Scott wrote a series of blog posts (starting here, then here, and here) showing some initial exploratory data analysis (ETA) in R and also some in-depth looks into a few topics that sparked his interest along the way. That’s exactly what Tableau wants to enable people to do, so with this first episode of “Let me tableau this for you” I want to show how easy it is to get to the same interesting insights Scott outlined in his write-up, only without all the coding. I’m not sure how long it took him to get from finding the data to generating all the plots in the article, but my guess would be it took longer than this ~20 minute screencast. Enjoy the video below, and please let us know in the comments section if you have anything to add. Please refer to the original post if you want to know more about the idea behind Let me tableau this for you (LMTTFY).

Just like “to google” has become habitual language use since Google as a search engine became available, we see more and more people using Tableau in a similar manner: “to tableau” as a synonym for “to visualize data”.

to tableau

While, admittedly, this doesn’t translate well into my day-to-day locale of German it sparked an idea.